brainwagon

In response to my previous post, @xek replied: @brainwagon has anyone suggested the stupid bjt inverting “buffer” trick? 1/28/2012 7:04 pm via TweetCaster for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite @xek Josh Myer Well, the fact is I had heard of doing that. It’s not really hard to rig something that will convert the RS232 level from the GPS into [...]

I used to be an electrical engineer like you, then I took an arrow in the knee. (If you don’t get this, google for “arrow in the knee”, and guess what Xbox game I spent the morning and afternoon playing instead of working on something cool.) I’ve had a number of projects that could benefit [...]

While researching something completely different, I found Adrian Freed’s very cool page with code to generate high quality sine waves using PWM on the Arduino. This code could serve as an audio frequency signal generator, or as the basis of a computer music project. It also demonstrates some non-trivial Arduino wizardry in dealing with PWM [...]

I’ve been trying to do a bit more Arduino programming and interfacing lately. Nothing too difficult, but just trying to expand my junkbox and my skills so that I can quickly prototype new ideas and expand the kind of projects that I can tackle in the limited time that I seem to have for playing [...]

This is just a plug for a cute little pair of gadgets that I got the other day.. If you are like me and use solderless breadboards to experiment with stuff on the Arduino, you end up with the Arduino and the breadboard connected by a hodge podge of wires, and if you accidently tug [...]

First of all, I really like the Arduino. There are lots of reasons: great community, relatively inexpensive, wide hardware availability and variety, and often a good “impedance” match to projects. But there are a few design choices (both hardware and software) that can be a nuisance, especially as you try to push the limits of [...]

Update: Welcome Hack-a-day readers! If you are looking for the schematics for this “transmitter” (really just a simple oscillator, send some love to radio guru Steve Weber over at his website. You could really use any oscillator you like, even a canned oscillator (although the square waves would generate lots of harmonics). Yesterday’s project coupled [...]

My G0UPL QRSS beacon is working pretty well, but is only putting out about 40mw of power, when it probably should be putting out 100mw. I was pondering oscillators in general, and (as I do often) surf for information and inspiration. I found both on Steve “Melt Solder” Weber’s website, in the form of a [...]

Allright, I was playing Skyrim most of the day, and didn’t really have my brain firing at it’s highest level when I sat down and decided to try to put something together. We’ve all been there, right? I realized that I had some of this cool RGB LED strip that I ordered from Tayda Electronics, [...]

I’ve received a couple of requests for my own Arduino Basic modifications. They are pretty straightforward and small, but might be of some use, and I probably won’t have a chance to do any significant work for a couple of more weeks, so I thought I’d just toss them out there for consumption. This is [...]

Today, through a bit of serendipity involving twitter and the web, I managed to have lunch with Nanode designer Ken Boak, who happened to be on an unrelated visit to the Bay Area this week. We exchanged brief messages for the first time a couple of weeks ago, as I was intrigued with his idea [...]

Well, to test my nanode‘s Ethernet capability, I put it on the web! Check it out by clicking this link. Hurrah! Not too impressive, but consider: it is dynamically generated on an eight bit microcontroller that costs about $35, Ethernet included. Perhaps not as cool as the Raspberry Pi, but unlike the Raspberry Pi, you [...]

My wife is the best. She listens to me even when I yammer on about the most boring and geeky of topics, and does so with patience and grace. What’s more, she even remembers what I talk about, and I reap the benefits at Christmas time. I mentioned Nanode about a month back, because I [...]

As a followup to my post yesterday regarding Arduino BASIC, here’s a contest challenge to extend the Arduino basic to drive the Nanode, an Arduino compatible microcontroller board that extends the conventional Arduino with Ethernet and other cool features. The challenge is to make a good hack using Tiny BASIC: perhaps by extending the BASIC [...]

Edsger Dijkstra, Dutch computer scientist and winner of the 1972 Turing Award wrote: It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. While I have respect for his great contributions to the field, in my [...]